Marketing - 10 Steps

(1) Know The Value Of A Customer

How much can you afford to spend to bring in a new customer?

Most businesses never calculate this number, but it should be the foundation of all your marketing.

Why? Because it tells you your breakeven point for all the marketing you do, which leads us to point (2).

(2) Track Your Marketing Costs And Returns

Once you know the value of a customer, you need to know how much your marketing costs (in both time and money) and how many customers it’s bringing in.

Divide the cost by the number of new customers and comepare it to your breakeven point.

This will let you know whether you should continue your marketing or whether you should stop it.

And, if you can roll out the marketing that works or stop marketing that doesn’t, you will increase your profits.

(3) Test And Improve Your Marketing

Once you’re tracking your results, you can improve any part of your marketing through a series of low-cost tests.

If you’ve got an ad, try a different headline and compare the results. It could easily multiply your response rate. Or you can change the way you state your offer. Or your call to action (sales close).

One approach will always outperform the other and, if the new approach is better, congratulations, you’ve improved your marketing.

As well as the words on your ads, sales letters and websites, you should also test new products/services, prices and guarantees.

(4) Differentiate Yourself

Why should someone buy from you instead of your competitors? People usually buy for a reason so, if you want to compete effectively for new buyers or take clients from your competitors you’ve got explain why this decision will benefit them.

(5) Target The Right Audience

In most marketing, there’s a price of admission i.e. it costs you (in time or money) to deliver your sales message to someone.

Which means, if you don’t focus your marketing, you’ll waste a lot of your efforts on people who will never buy from you.

Learn to identify which people are most likely to buy from you (demographics and psychographics) and, where applicable, which prospects are going to be most profitable.

(6) Follow Up On Enquiries

It’s often said that it takes, on average, seven contacts before someone buys.

Now, that’s a generalisation and the real number varies greatly from industry to industry, but the message is there: most businesses don’t follow up often enough.

Take your recent prospects that didn’t buy and follow-up one more time. Then measure your returns from this extra contact. If it made you money, contact the non-buyers again. And keep adding follow-up steps until it’s no longer cost-effective.

(7) Up-sell

Up-selling is a technique used in many industries to increase their average profit per sale. The most famous up-selling question is ‘would you like fries with that’, but there are lots of other places where you’re up-sold. For example, when you bought your car, you probably paid for some of the extra features.

Sometimes up-selling is just actively suggesting things that might go with their main purchase (blank DVDs if they’re buying a DVD recorder, a tie to go with the suit they bought, or an estate agent offering a mortgage service).

It can be offering a discount for a larger unit of purchase (e.g. ‘buy three, get one free’).

Or it can be creating a package of services that you can offer as an alternative to your basic offer.

Most businesses can find one form of up-selling that fits their situation and, with the right offer, it’s normal for around 30% of buyers to choose the more profitable option.

(8) Prove It

People are cynical when they’re being sold to so, when you make a claim about your product or your company, it pays to back that claim up with some evidence.

This evidence can be research (an independent survey showed), awards (we were voted the best), expert opinion (Which magazine said), testimonials or even your own promise backed up by a cast-iron guarantee.

(9) Work Your Customer List

The easiest people to sell to are the people who’ve bought from you and are happy. Yet how much of your marketing efforts are directed at maximising your sales from existing customers?

Most businesses are so busy chasing new customers, they never sit down and ask themselves what other quality products and services can we offer our existing clients?

And many businesses don’t even bother asking clients for repeat orders.

If you’ve ever managed a sales team, you’ll know that a lot of business comes from reps calling on clients and those clients that aren’t called on make fewer (and smaller) repeat orders.

With the advent of email, you can keep in touch with your clients for free. You’ll find that sending regular messages will cause people to buy more often and increase your client retention.

(10) Ask For Referrals

You probably already get a lot of your new clients via word of mouth and referral but, if you’ve never implemented an active referral system, you’re missing out.

An effective referral system does three things:

Firstly, it helps your clients understand what sort of people you’d like them to refer to you.

Secondly, it makes it easy for them to give you those referrals.

Thirdly, it rewards them for the referrals they send you.

I did work with an estate agent who would tell her clients if any of your friends are thinking about moving home, I keep track of the selling prices of every home in the city and I’d be happy to tell them the current prices of homes in their area, just ask them to give me a call.

Contrast that to a typical estate agent who says ‘here’s my card, if anyone you know is moving home, ask them to give me a call’.

That’s just a selfish request for business. The first estate agent got it right and made a generous offer to advise for free.

There are lots of ways to encourage referrals: free consultations, free samples, introductory offers, bring a friend events and so on.

And there are lots of ways to reward clients who refer.

If you do those two things and you make it clear to the client (if it’s not obvious) what sort of person you’d like to meet, you’ll find your referral rate will shoot up.

About the author: Steve Gibson is a marketer working with businesses all over the UK. To learn more about his marketing methods and services, please visit his site:

Steve Gibson Consulting

According to a recent report by Pitney Bowes, snail mail is preferred to email spamming … yes you read right!

If you want to send unsolicited messages about your business to a lot of people at once, don’t do it with email. That would be spam. Basically, you can send one person an unsolicited email about your business. That’s called doing business. We all do that, all the time. But send an unsolicited email to a whole list of people at once that’s spam. It’s not spam if you send individual emails to each person about your business.

So use snail-mail to get the word out. According to Pitney Bowes, people are more likely to read it, and less likely to bin it. Best of all, include a URL in all your snail mail, asking people to visit your website and subscribe to your email list (and make it worth their while).

The power of a customer list

A restaurant in New York was completely gutted by fire and closed for three entire months.

Yet the first day it reopened it was full.

How did it do this? - Because its most important asset was not burnt - it was a list of customer email addresses. So it was able to keep its customers informed and a week before it reopened, it made an offer the customers could not refuse. That’s the power of a customer list.